PM Ponders Taking Field to Safeguard Italy’s Sacrifices

Prime minister has yet to decide. Positive signals over stability budget. Monti calls for Italians who made sacrifices not to be penalised

ROME – Yesterday was a quiet day for Mario Monti, insofar as any day can be quiet when you have just announced your resignation from the premiership. For the PM, it was a traditional Sunday on his Milan stamping ground where he attended mass at the church of San Pietro in Sala with his wife Elsa. Residents looked on as he strolled and stopped for a coffee. One passer-by chided him but a large group of supporters shouted at him to “carry on”.

Mr Monti smiled but made no reply and nor will he in the next few days. The premier wants time to reflect on whether to join the political fray. Obviously, he is aware that it is a matter of hours – not months any more but just the time needed to approve the stability budget – bearing in mind that President Napolitano has already set a date for his own evaluations in barely a week’s time. Nothing is set in stone but, as the PM tells those close to him, if he does stand, it will only be “so as not to squander the nest-egg” of initiatives and political culture that he has squirrelled away in a year in power. Nor does he want to penalise “Italians who in all these months have made sacrifices”, the same Italians who when recovery kicks in will rightly want to “pocket the dividends”. That prospect would rapidly evaporate if populism of whatever kidney, or backpedalling on European integration, budget-balancing and the economy, were to prevail.

The prime minister is unconcerned that the decision to resign announced on Saturday might create problems for Parliament on the stability budget. To the contrary, he is convinced that without his resignation, things would have been worse. Given the issues raised by the many corrections to the government’s draft, which he views as a consequence of the now-ongoing election campaign, the announcement will speed up the budget’s progress and better protect its provisions.

Obviously, worries remain with regard to the markets and the bond spread, which go live again this morning. But Mr Monti is hoping that Sunday’s “buffer effect” and the reassurances that all the parties, People of Freedom (PDL) included, must now make on the swift approval of the stability budget will put a brake on speculation. Above all, he is happy at the way the international press – and by and large the Italian press, too – has reacted to his resignation. There has been a chorus of kind words for his efforts over the year, mingled with concern over the country’s future if he is no longer at the helm.

The PM confirmed Italy’s commitment to carry through the current reforms in the course of telephone conversations with European partners, many of whom, including the French president François Hollande and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, he will be seeing today in Oslo at the ceremony for the award of Europe’s Nobel Prize. Those contacts will also be invaluable in the run-up to Thursday and Friday’s major Council of Europe meeting on banking union.

Mr Monti has a full week ahead of him on both the European and domestic fronts to work out whether he can get anything else, if only the ILVA decree, through as well as the stability budget. All should become clear, however, between 17 and 21 December, opening the way for the dissolution of Parliament and his resignation as premier. Needless to say, events will follow a calendar agreed with the President’s Office until the election, probably in the latter half of February. During the Christmas period, Mr Monti may also announce his decision on whether or not, and in what form, he will lead a centrist grouping, a major new development on an Italian political scene dominated for the past twenty years by a two-pole system.

The Prime Minister’s Office has already scheduled the traditional year-end press conference for 21 December but that could be postponed until after Christmas if horse trading is still under way and decisions have yet to be reached. In the meantime, Mr Monti will be watching the parties’ last moves in Parliament, noting their behaviour on the stability budget and listening to what their leaders’ say. With no exceptions. It may be true that his resignation was prompted primarily by Angelino Alfano’s speech to the Chamber of Deputies but Pier Luigi Bersani’s stated intention of tweaking the Monti agenda and the fact that one of his allies, Nichi Vendola, has never made a secret of his opposition to it, also occasion concern over how to protect the nest-egg for the benefit of Italians “who have made sacrifices in the past year”.